Thursday, 30 May 2013

An
email arrives
from
a friend returning from Bucharest, andfrom
encounters
with 'El Flaco'Dany, Ricardo Viquiera, and Jorge Lladó. Three wonderful
dancers
of salon tango, who
tour and teach, dancers
with a background in the milongas, rather than a background in
professional dance
or gymnastics.How
come all
three are in Bucharest? Of course El Flaco has visited
London, but
how
come London is hardly
on the map, unlike most of the rest of Europe, when it comes to salon
tango, especially
since these days a substantial number of us dance, or try to dance,
salon?
Isn't
it
pathetic?

Not
that there's a lot we can do, except rant, like me. Visitors
from outside the EU who want to work here are treated as immigrants, so
employing
them legally is a complicated and expensive business, and if they
aren't legally employed they can't be advertised. & sadly
tangueros with a background in the milongas aren't invited. It was explained to me
that
visiting
teachers
need to give
earth-shattering displays to
encourage
people to learn from them, but
I think this view
demeans the
intelligence of UK
tangueros. It's
an outdated view that might have been true six or seven years ago,
but for many of us it's no longer the case. Of
course it's
true that the
teachers who are brought over 'know' the salon
dance: they know the steps and have a thousand ingenious variations.
But it's not their dance. They are likely to teach a subject, not a passion and a
culture. They
can
teach
the
facts, they
teach what
is danced but can they teach
how
it is danced, the feeling?Aren't they dance
teachers who don't actually teach dancing?

It's
really time this changed and we started to enjoy the tango teaching available across the rest of
Europe. It seems we are trying to find our way there, even without visits
from dancer/teachers
like those three, and it would be good to have some help!

&
who is Jorge Lladó? He's younger than the others, in his 30s. I've
seen how faces light up when he arrives rather
quietly and quickly at
a local milonga, and
it's
obviously where he loves to be. There's a great interview with him
and his father on PractimiloguerosThere's
also an increasing list of YouTube clips, but sadly I can't find one
of him and partner dancing actually in a milonga, so this clip of a demonstration at El Beso will have to do.

Personally
I'd rather watch this over and over than five seconds of an
earth-shattering display. There's plenty to learn; the precise,
unhurried
tempo, the energy, the softness of the feet, the posture. & much
more.

Jorge
learned from his father, now
in his 70s and a dancer since he was very young. The
story is in the Practimilongueros interview.
First,
Jorge was standing wrongly, his head held forward, in effect,
round-shouldered. It took 14 months to correct the posture. (How
would any of us react to spending 14 months being told to get our
posture right?) Then he learned a salida, and wanted more, but his
father said: 'You're moving but not dancing!' One year later (how
many of us would have waited?) he was taught more steps and started
to take his mother to milongas, where he danced with her for two
years. After that all the women wanted to dance with him. (It's
curiously reminiscent of those Zen master stories.) & above all
he was taught courtesy and respect, the bedrock of the milonga.

Jorge
is also the nephew of the late Tete, spent time with him and learned
from him. There might not be much apparent similarity in the way of dancing,
which
is as it should be, but
I
recognise the same joyful enthusiasm
in
the dance of both, and
I'd assume that for both of them it comes
from
the
music, from
vals
in particular.

A
visit from Jorge could make a big change in UK tango. For too long UK
tango has focused on externals, on steps, on
appearances.It'll
take us a lifetime to even begin to get a real feel for the music,
and how that feeling moves the torso, but
someone
like Jorge could show us the heart of it, the warmth and enthusiasm, the
courtesy of
tango, and
show us how it is really danced.

PS. Since I wrote this I came across another demo by Jorge which is very much more extreme than the one above, and in every way a poor example to social dancers. Perhaps his teaching is still very sound, but why create a 'do as I say but not as I do' situation? I went back to the partial video of Ricardo Vidort and Muma dancing to Quatro Palabras to enjoy again the gentleness, kindness, musicality of tango. It's really sweet! It would be so good to see someone dancing and teaching like Ricardo again.

Tuesday, 7 May 2013

(I've
no academic
authority
to write on the history of tango music: I'm
just trying to work it
out
for myself.
What I've written may well be wrong
in places,
but it is based on the stories in Todotango and Wikepedia. & it's
based on my own ears, what I've heard when I've listened to the
music, so
of course it is partial and biased: no apologies for that.)

I
get the impression
that at
the end of the 1920s and into the 30s Carabelli's
recordings set
the pace,arrangements
written
by a highly skilled
classical musician experiencedin
ensemble playing, who
wasexcited
by
the rhythmic vitalityof
jazz and
was also
respectful
of the tango of the day.
Busoni
thought of music without prescriptive labels, and
Carabelli
chose
to maketango
richer,
he
took tango to a new level.
To
mehis
recordings
are the earliest
tango that actually
sounds
like the tango of
the Golden Age.
I
can't help hearing, for instance, a
direct link between the
music of Carabelli
and Pedro Laurenz. Not
only did Laurenz play in the OTV, but his
tango
sounds
rooted
in Carabelli
as
if Laurenz,
with his powerful
sense of rhythm and energetic
playing, turned up Carabelli's more
restrained music
to 11.

There
are other
links between tango and jazz. Fresedo had visited the US
as early as 1921, but I've not noticed much jazz influence that
early: it seems it was Carabelli who made decisive use of what he'd
heard in jazz. Fresedo, of course, recordedsome
marvellous tracks with Dizzy Gillespiemuch
laterin
1956.

I've
just come across this,tango in 1912, when
Canaro was 24, when
Carabelli was still in Bologna.
But
tango
recording
started to peak in the late 20s, when
sound quality was reasonably good.
Records
must
have made
a huge difference. For
the first time musicians
could listen to
a wide range of music whenever
they
wanted, and could listen over and over again and
explore the details, finding
out
how and why a piece sounded as it did, instead
of relying
on piano
scores, the
bare bones of a piece, or
a transitory
live performances,
or half-remembered renditions.I'm
sure
the availability of recordings must
have contributed
to the speed of change in the music.

&
I'm curious:
I'd
love to know what was in Canaro's record collection in 1930, or
Fresedo's, or D'Arienzo's!
For
sure they'd have had a Victrola at home, at least so they could listen to their
own recordings, and
shelves of 78s.
I wonder if we'll know some day: I assume that the history of the
music and the dance are subjects for research in Buenos Aires.
Perhaps one day there will be a really detailed
history, hopefully in English. I
enjoy Canaro a
lot,
but on reflection it
occurs to me that the
Canaro I love
has always been between 1929
and the late thirties, a period during which his
music became more supple, it 'sang', he
didn't want all the notes to be the same length.
Earlier
Canaro is a bit rigid, and his later music is often quite
strident.

The
OTV
and the Orquesta Carabelli only
existed for recording. Apparently
neither ever gave live performances, which
is curious
because I suspect
the music he played, and
the music that followed his lead,had
a big influence on the
way people danced. I suspect
the
dance developed
a melodic sensibility to
get closer to this
new
music with
its fusion of opposites,
ofromantic
classicism and the rhythmic
urgency of jazz, andthe
result was a
smooth intimate dance full of feeling.
I don't know if he danced tango himself, or hung out in milongas, but
he seemed to have had a very instinctive feel for the music people
would
want
to dance
to. His
output of dance music recordings,
including
jazz and tango, was considerable:
it's
just that there aren't so many recordings of tango with his name on.
(I
read that his
jazz orquesta performed live.)Perhaps
his
name isn't well known in tango simply
because
there just
aren't
that many Orquesta Carabelli recordings available:
most of
Carabelli's
recordings are as the OTV.

It's
not so easy to find the
recordings Carabelli
made
under
his own name.
I've got the Buenos Aires Tango Club (BATC) CD,
which
is excellent: buy
it and you support local enterprise, and
the activity of people who really care about preserving
their
music.
They
issue
two other CDs: 'Inspiracion' with many of the same tracks as the
BATC CD, and 'Mi Evocacion', which is the CD on Spotify, and is a
mixture
of dance music, some tango.Check
out their catalogue, which
is
huge and excellent. They
don't sell downloads so
it
means importing CDs, but
their CDs are probably cheaper per track than buying downloads.

iTunes
has three CDs, but I haven't downloaded them, so I don't know what's
on them: they may
also be a
mixture of different kinds of dance music. El Bandoneon in Barcelona
hasa CD,
but
it is
out of stock.
Amazon
UK currently
has
71 tracks for download though some tracks
are
duplicates and not all are tango. But at least La Guiñada, and
Quatro Palabaras are there. (If
you don't
mind contributing
to Amazon's
untaxed profits, that is.)

As
to OTV, there's no shortage of recordings of this marvelous music.
Spotify
has a number of albums, and the two-volume Euro Records
selection is available from BATC. (Euro
records is part of the BATC: same
catalogue.)

Perhaps
it shouldn't be surprising that it is all so good: I've yet to come
across anything from Carabelli, whether
as Carabelli or as OTV,
that wasn't really excellent. His
name deserves to be known better. It's not that he's undervalued: his
name just isn't known, but
I believe he established the tango we still dance to.

PS: SimbaTango drew my attention to the Tangohub summary of places to buy tango, particularly from a UK perspective. There are warnings there aboutBATC, about the time it can take to get CDs from them, and also about the quality of the CD discs they use. However, there's a wealth of music in their catalogue, and the prices are good. If you have a friend visiting BsAs, their office/shop is just off Corrientes a few blocks from El Beso: otherwise, if you want to make a serious order I'd think of calling and talking through the delivery options with them (or get a Spanish speaker to call for you) before ordering. As to quality of the actual discs, it's normal to rip them to lossless anyway.